The seventh in a monthly series of selected poetry on different themes.

Gone

Mamang Dai

We have long journeys in our blood.The road has no end.The lanes and streets are lined in my eyes,the horizon burns in my head.At night we sleep with guns and gullstugging at land and oceans,and ropes coiled to barren rockwhere once flowers were to seedpumping blood, and singing voices.

How would anyone know what we have tried to do,when there was me, and you,and there was the burnt black hillmonumental with the faces of our people,until the next moonrise showed ussomething about change,and the existence of dreams.

The steep hillside is a hard place.There is nowhere to rest our feeteven when I want to kneel and pray,moved to tears by a rainbow sky.

What is feltleft unsaid,is a sadness.Bereft of our symbolsthis strange tattoo in my heartis the sound of footsteps.

I know the clouds are hiding behind your eyeseven as you kiss my brow,but this is the way that was promised usthe day we met ten thousand messengerscarrying the whispers of the world.

Memorial Time

EV Ramakrishnan

The mirror wall is etchedwith letters.You touch them as if you are carving namesin human flesh.Memorial poles stand betweenthe living and the departed.The bells commemoratesilence.The boatman at the ferry knowsthose with fewer wordswill neverreturn.I abandoneda third of my wordsat every ferry-crossingto reach here.Behind the mirror of water, thereis a realm of glass for those who are gonefrom language, but none for thosewhose language is gone.

Being Seventeen, Being Boys

K Srilata

It’s cricket in the blazing heatand they are back,a glisten of faces,grime-trail on the bathroom floor.Over tall mountains of rice,a brief hungry silence,and then, the ribbing-each-otherabout school crushes and missed catches.And to think that they are done,nearly done,being boys.

The United States of Amnesia

Sophia Naz

Welcome to the United States of AmnesiaWhere the average attention span isan albatross around the neck of historydrowning in largesse of half-caf mocha frappucino

At every other corner, nine tenthsof teeth submerge in this melting pot, super bowlof guillotined Halloween, cropped and photoshoppedto the death and the bell trolls a Clockwork Orangeclones & minions man the phonesringing off the hook likean armless pirate with his peddlingfinger on the twitterout to abduct youonly, lonely immigrant child, Americathis illegal erection election yearunlike any other in livingerasure

Welcome to the Dystopian Statesof Amnesia, to the gloom of the homeless underpassesto the panhandling flutes drowned outin the tropics of the nocturnal subterranean

Washed up on your shores like a bottle with a pent up ocean in my bladdermemory is the only currency I holdthe infected blankets up to the light, I knowthe smell of genocide. I have watchedwomen shamed as witches, watched them falllike dominos on a Salem noon. I have met Sally Hemings and the strangefruit of your history, America. I have fallen in your uncivil warof a thousand and one episodes. This beast you thought you tamed? He prowlsthe profiled night wearinga police uniform

How A Very Old Poem Might Read

Kala Krishnan Ramesh

Those you love best knowwhere suddenly your shore curvesinto unexplored landings,and which covesyou are drawn into on certain days.Those who are newly arrivedwill always ask,“And what lies there, beyond thatcurve,where even the sun’s light seems different,may we sometime take a look?”On the days that you love best,boats come bearing untold tales,and he and she you love bestlay their heads close to yourson the sand’s warm,and speak ofthings that take you whereyou have loved to be.In this riverwhich is never the sameand never the same again,where even the accustomed moon iscaught unawares,each of us willsometimes stagger and fearingunmentionable things, ask,“Are you still mine, are you mine,and sometimes, mine alone?”

Old Man’s Death

Gieve Patel

There may be a very small comfortIn knowing yourself finallyUseless – when even grandchildrenHave grown beyond your love,And your would-be widowHas outhobbled you andWont be around to break withOne or two of her last thick tears,And you not caring much forYour fellowmen, the doctorsWont get your body –To know how simply youWill be bundled away, startlingA lifelong friend who findsHe cannot mournAt the quick and easy changes:A sprinkling of water,The disappearance of an odour,A turn of bed-sheets, leavingA bed, a chair,Perhaps a whole room,With clarity in them.

This selection is curated by Rohini Kejriwal. She also curates TheAlipore Post, a daily newsletter stemming from a love of​ art, poetry, music, and all things beautiful.